


lady lazarus

by lavitanuova



Series: if we were lesbians by necessity [2]
Category: The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, friendship ended with incest now lesbians are my friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:00:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28927719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavitanuova/pseuds/lavitanuova
Summary: "What are you punishing yourself for?" he'd asked. "You can't help what you feel."Jay tensed, holding her hand very still, and tried her best to keep her voice even. "How do I feel?""I see how you look at Clary."(previously published as "because you want to die for love")
Relationships: Clary Fray/Jace Wayland, Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Series: if we were lesbians by necessity [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1989154
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	lady lazarus

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Sylvia Plath and her poems Daddy, Ariel, and Lady Lazarus. Also apologies to Stephen King for stealing the bird metaphor from IT.  
> CW for internalised homophobia and death.

> And I am coming home to you  
>  With my own blood in my mouth  
>  And I am coming home to you  
>  If it’s the last thing that I do
> 
> _\- The Mountain Goats, Sax Rhomer #1_

* * *

Picture this, if you will.

A flock of birds perch on a telephone wire. There's a hum in the air, the rustle of wind through leaves, the lone car revving its engine. The morning sun paints the world blood-orange, and suddenly the birds explode into the sky, rising like a cloud of smoke—

The midday light shines through the lens of a looking-glass. Photons bounce off each other, nearer nearer nearer, until they're all condensed into a single ray of light. Blinding, sizzling, yellow-white, and when it hits your skin the heat feels like it's coming from within you, trying to break free—

A girl falls in love.

* * *

Right now, the girl in question is about to die.

(Let’s call her by her name, shall we? _Jay_ as in the chattering bird, _Jay_ as in Joanne Abigail, _Jay_ followed by so many other names that don’t seem to fit. Her name is Jay. It’s the only name she’s ever had.)

The point of the sword spots Valentine Morgenstern’s shirt with blood. Jay squeezes its hilt with steady hands. She knows what she’s going to do. Hundreds of innocents are dead because she couldn’t muster up the strength to take down a villain who calls himself her father. She won’t falter now, not after everything. Not after Max.

Nothing else matters.

This can be the moment it ends. _Is_ going to be the moment it ends. She’ll push the sword in, quick and bloodless, like she’s doing nothing more than taking down a demon on another routine hunt. He’s weak, eyes wide and pleading, but she doesn’t care. Soft and useless daughter- what a joke. His soft and useless daughter will kill him. Jay’s sure of it.

She thinks, _I told you to make it obedient. Instead, you taught it to love you._

She thinks, _Pain is only what you allow it to be._

She thinks, _Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through._

The man who is not her father stretches out his hand. She’s half-ready to bat it away, finish it once and for all—

But something's flashing through the air, silver and sharp, and before she can even see what it is Jay crumples forward. 

* * *

_This is going to be the moment it ends._

Oh, Joanne, didn't your father ever teach you to watch your back in a fight? 

* * *

Izzy hovered somewhere behind Jay’s shoulder, clicking the blades of the plastic scissors together again and again. In the reflection of the bathroom mirror, Jay met her eyes- dark, small, serious in the way that only twelve-year-olds can be- and carried out a silent conversation. 

_Are you ready?_ Izzy tilted her head forward.

 _Do you even have to ask?_ Jay rolled her eyes, but started slightly when the blade jabbed into her neck. She wrapped her towel tighter about her shoulders, felt her blonde curls fall like soft rain. It was a warm summer that year, the type of weather where the heat sticks to your bones and gets under your skin. Down on the street tiny birds chirped, people chattered about nothing, a radio blared the latest Britney Spears song, and all that noise rose up to their window like so much hot air.

When Izzy was done, she spun Jay around to the mirror with a flourish. Jay gasped and ran a hand through her new bob—short enough to stay out of the way in combat, choppy but just enough to still look cool. The girl in the mirror didn’t feel like anyone she had been before- she was new, changed, in some strange way she couldn’t put her finger on.

Turning behind, Jay grinned up at her sister, her beautiful-brilliant-incredible sister, and mouthed _I love you, I love you, I love you._ It would be the first time she truly meant the words.

* * *

Someone’s arms are around her. Someone’s saying _my daughter, my Jo,_ and someone’s jerking the hilt of a sword out of her body. Her vision’s dissolved into a million shattering lights, like broken champagne glasses, like crystal chandeliers. Thoughts flit in and out of her mind at random, but she doesn’t have the energy to hold onto any of them except one.

The parabatai rune on her shoulder burns.

* * *

Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't this—for Alec's voice and face and manner to be full of real kindness, even when barely a minute ago he was calling her an idiot and pulling glass out of her knuckles. 

_What are you punishing yourself for?_ he'd asked. _You can't help what you feel._

She tensed, holding her hand very still, and tried her best to keep her voice even. _How do I feel?_

 _I see how you look at her._ He didn't meet her eyes when he said this, and yet he wasn't avoiding her gaze. It was as though he was looking right through her—like she was as transparent as the shattered glass. She'd tried her hardest, all her life, to make herself opaque, to mask herself in dark jackets and sarcasm, and yet someone would always see through the act. Alec, of course. Who else? 

_What's between you and Magnus Bane?_ Jay fired back, feeling a twisted sort of satisfaction when he paled in response. 

_I don't —_

_I'm not stupid._

_There isn't anything between us—_ here he paused, the silence thick with something neither of them could name— _anymore. There's nothing between us anymore._

Though she didn't notice it at the time, in hindsight she could see that the witchlight slanting through the broken window hovered around Alec like dust, turning the tips of his black hair brown. Out of the corner of her eye, the towers of Idris gleamed in the night. She tasted blood in her mouth. She didn't know why. 

So. She knew he knew she knew. The both of them were tarred with the same brush, then. At least she could take some comfort in that. 

After a long time, Jay began to speak. _Love makes us liars. The Seelie Queen told me that. So don’t judge me for lying about how I feel. You do it too._ She stood up, shrugged her jacket on. He didn't react. _And now I want you to do it again._

 _What do you mean?_

_Lie for me._

* * *

Later, though she doesn't know this, Alec pulls Magnus into a kiss in front of the entire room. He won't care who's watching, won't care about anything but Magnus, but when they separate he'll think, for a moment, of Jay. 

* * *

Clary, then. 

For a long time Jay had looked at Clary like she was nothing less than an angel—her lost love, her Beatrice, unattainable and otherworldly and shining with a pure heavenly light. If loving her was fire, being loved by her would be self-combustion. Jay couldn't imagine it, couldn't imagine poisoning Clary like that. 

_I’m part monster_ , she'd told Clary once, after the explosion of the Wayland Manor. If this had happened in a book, she'd call the symbolism heavy-handed, and yet here she was, lying in the rubble of her childhood, holding a girl that she'd grown up being told not to love. _Part everything I’ve tried so hard to burn out, to destroy. It explains everything. It explains why I feel the way I do about you._

They weren't touching, but it felt like they were. Clary's breath caught. _You said you just wanted to be my friend from now on._ A reminder of greenhouses, of flowers, of kisses they'd swore never to be repeated. Teenage experimentation, they'd agreed. Nothing more. 

_I lied, Clary._ Her voice was bitter. _Demons lie._ _God knows, I don’t want anyone but you. I don’t even want to want anyone but you._

She waited for the eyes scrunched in disgust, the awkward separation, everything she'd come to expect. 

None of it came. 

_I don't want anyone but you, either._

Very suddenly, they were kissing. Jay could taste something smoky on her tongue—ashes and dust, surely, but also something else. A fire had been set inside them, small but rising and rising, like a spark that consumes a forest. It was a beautiful warmth, it was a terrifying warmth, it was Clary's hair spilling across the stones like blood, it was her forest-green eyes growing dark, it was everything she'd been taught to fear but loved anyway. There wasn't a thing between them now, no pretense or mask—

The cold metal of the ring on her throat bumped against Clary's shoulder. She stilled. 

_Jay, don't._

_Don't what?_

_Don't touch me for a second._

* * *

The second-last time she'd seen Clary, she watched the curtains cast shadows on her face as she slept, shaded the golden-orange of the autumn sky. Dust hovered in the light, drifting with the slightest breeze. The room was sparse, and the only thing in the way of furnishing was the desk, the nightstand, and the bed, all made of simple hand-carved wood. They could live like this forever, her and Clary, picking berries in a cottage in Idris, eating homemade dinners with her family, and they could do this next morning and every morning after that. But the more she imagined it, the more the fantasy grew blurry at the edges. She was her father’s daughter, after all. She was built to be a warrior.

Besides, Jay knew that the night they spent together could not be repeated in any way. This was something that would happen only once in her life. She would never feel like this again.

She didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing.

Jay left the letter and the ring on the nightstand. Clary had about as much right to it as she did. It was passed down to a son anyway, so technically the _rights_ she had to it were about zero. Sometimes she'd wonder: if she'd been born a boy, would it all be simpler? She wanted to believe so, but something told her love would be complicated in any world there was. 

Pushing back the curtains, she opened the window and slipped out of the house.

The last time she’d seen Clary, well-

* * *

This story is not a tragedy. The girl doesn’t know this yet. The girl doesn’t know a great many things, but that’s okay.

What she does know is that she is dying. She’s in her father’s arms, like a small girl, and her father’s holding her, and she’s trying to turn her face to see Clary but she can’t, for some reason she can’t bring up the strength to turn her head. Jay doesn’t want to die like this, not in front of _her,_ not by _his_ hand- but nobody really gets what they want, don’t they? She shifts herself slightly. He doesn’t notice. The landscape stretches out in front of her, cold and empty, Alicante glowing in the distance. Everything’s getting darker and darker, until out of the corner of her eye she sees the vaguest flicker of red hair. 

Clary looks at her. Jay looks at Clary.

She wants to say _don’t cry._

She wants to say _I love you._

She wants to say-

* * *

Here’s the way it goes:

In the beginning (or maybe the end?), there was nothing.

Then there was a little less nothing.

Then there was Clary, and she’s calling a name, and it takes Jay some time to realise it’s her own. She stirs, and finds she’s inhabiting a body, and that she has eyes that she can see with. It’s disorienting, to say the least. 

Lake Lyn is desolate. There’s a lump on the sand that might be a body or might be a stone, and there’s Clary, lying there, beautiful and human and breathing and breathing and oh thank God she’s breathing. Her skin’s streaked with dirt. Her clothes are bloody. Jay drags herself across the sand, leaving marks of blood behind her. Every muscle in her body screams, but she doesn’t really care. She’s coming home. She’s coming home.

Jay thinks of Idris in the spring, of birds perched on every roof and every tree, and the way they take wing into the sky, all at once, when the dawn rises. She thinks of the cobblestone streets spread out beneath her. She thinks of her motorcycle soaring above New York, the arrow freed from its bow, the dew that flies suicidal into the cauldron of morning. 

_Clary,_ she says, voice hoarse. _Open your eyes._


End file.
